In the hardware part of his keynote address at WWDC, Jobs officially introduced the G5-based computers previously leaked on the Apple store.

The new G5 machines, with the IBM 970 processor, use the "world's first 64-bit desktop processor" (and the "fastest 64-bit processor ever") but run both 64-bit and 32-bit apps natively, and run up to 2GHz. The bus is 1GHz ("fastest ever") and it is designed for dual processing and full symmetric processing.

Beyond the many numbers, the bottom line is that the new machines have a new architecture, and that the memory speed is now the bottleneck, not the processor or bandwidth speeds. So they can have up to 8GB of 128-bit DDR RAM, as it is efficient to keep data in memory. The memory bandwidth is one of the most talked-about features of the new architecture.

USB 2.0 is now included, as are FireWire 400 and 800, Bluetooth, AirPort Extreme, and digital audio in and out. The 4x SuperDrive is now standard, and it can house up to 500GB of internal storage.

For video, the GeForce FX5200 is standard on low-end models, Radeon 9600 Pro on high-end models.

The case of the new machines is redesigned too, from the ground up, focusing on decreasing noise and heat. It is an aluminum enclosure, with ports for FireWire and USB on the front, and a door on the side to get into the box. It has four distinct "thermal zones" with computer-controlled cooling with its nine (yes, nine) independent fans. And it is much quieter than its predecessor.

The G5 is 10 percent slower than the P4 and Xeon in SPEC int scores in single-proc units, but 20 percent faster in FPU scores, and the dual-proc G5 beats the dual-proc Xeon in all SPEC scores.

The models are a single 1.6 GHz ($1999), single 1.8GHz ($2399), and dual 2GHz ($2999). They will ship in August. A 3GHz processor will be available from IBM in 12 months.

Apple notes that recompiling apps for the 64-bit architecture is easy, and in some cases can be done in minutes.

There was no word about the heavily anticipated redesign of the 15" PowerBooks.

The 400MHz G3 you can pass to me, so I can have something to playwith the Mac OS on, as currently all I've got is a PC (albeit apretty decent one) and a MicroVax. In exchange, I'm willing toconsider letting you have my ITT XTRA, despite my irrationalsentimental attachment to it. It's only 4.77 MHz, and the 20MBhard drive is dead, but it has a full 640K of RAM, and the 360Kfloppy drive still works! (Note: This is not the "pretty decent"PC I was talking about, but my previous one.)

Is it just me, or does the new G5 look like a massive cheese grater from the front?

It looks more like an electic razor to me.

Unfortunately, it looks like they've abandoned the easy-access pull-down door that let you add ram and add-on cards with ease.

From the Apple web site:

Access is everythingThatâ(TM)s why the Power Mac G5â(TM)s easy-to-open side panel unlatches in a snap, giving you fast access to the slots and bays inside. Designed for no-hassle expansion, the Power Mac G5 lets you add things like memory or an AirPort Extreme card without tools. And easy-to-use drive guides let you mount high-capacity hard drives as soon as your requirements grow. Additionally, a locking mechanism on the side door prevents unauthorized access, keeping the inside of your computer safe from tampering.

Is it just me, or does the new G5 look like a massive cheese grater from the front?

The new Apple Powercheesegrater 9000 guarantees to grate cheese 9.7x faster than any Intel lookalike. Gastronomically impress your friends with freshly grated parmesan, romano or limburger cheese by simply moving a cheese block along the front (or back!) of the Powercheesegrater case. The groundbreaking 64-bit G5 CPU gently heats your cheese while you continue to grate. This computer simply gives the greatest grate imaginable -- all from the folks who brought you the original Macintosh computer. Call 1-800-MY-APPLE today for more information, or to place an order.

I suppose some people might wait, but don't underestimate the pent up demand for a high performance Mac. Apple's customers have already been waiting a looooong time for this machine. I don't think announcing that there will be a speed bump in a year will do much to the short term sales of the new boxes. Maybe in six months people will start holding off for the promised 3GHz boxes, but not now.

There is a very important reason for announcing a 3Ghz processor for next year...

The G4 used to be very impressive compared to PCs of the time - but it's been around for far too long, with limited speed bumps...

Announcing a 3Ghz model is letting people know that there is a roadmap in place for ramping up the performance...

People want to know that there is a future... with many Mac owners and quite a few potential 'switchers' staying away from the dual G4s as they are past their sell by date, announcing a roadmap for G5 development - and not just new machines themselves - may well see an increase in current Mac sales...

The amazing thing here is that for less than $13k (cheaper educational), I can get a system with 2 big flat panels that absolutely SPANKS the $40k SGI Octanes. There is absolutely no reason that anyone in the sciences and engineering fields should consider any other workstation provided the software is available. Even that has been mitigated by Apple's inclusion of X11 in Panther now.

The amazing thing here is that for less than $13k (cheaper educational), I can get a system with 2 big flat panels that absolutely SPANKS the $40k SGI Octanes.

Except that the Octane's bus is theoretically much, much faster. It has an end-to-end point speed of only about 3 and half GB/sec, but it can connect any of the individual systems to each other simultaneously at full speed; the memory can talk to the processor while the processor writes to the disk subsystem while the video card...and none of it ever has a collision and can operate at Crossbar's full point-to-point speed without effect from other subsystems.

Not only that, but as you add processor modules(which if I remember right, have memory on them?), you add Crossbar bus bandwidth; adding modules adds extra Crossbar channels(I think. It's been a long time since that technology briefing).

It's a quad-processor-capable system- so I don't think you are giving it a very fair shake; on a 4-processor system, I think each processor would have about +14GB/sec access to anything in the system(including memory), which is just a few GB shy of double the G5 which can only manage 8GB/sec for access to main memory. Oh, and let me remind you Crossbar is 5-6 years old...

Thanks, but if I want to push around multi-gigabyte datasets, I'll take the Octane. I find Hypertransport, at only 16 bits wide, destinctly unimpressive...

Quote:
Except that the Octane's bus is theoretically much, much faster. It has an end-to-end point speed of only about 3 and half GB/sec, but it can connect any of the individual systems to each other simultaneously at full speed
Uh, for those of you on the short bus, Apple's new memory chip is also point-to-point. From the G5 (system, not chip) white paper:
Advanced System Controller
A new system controller is central to the overall performance of the Power Mac G5. This revolutionary application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)â"one of the industryâ(TM)s fastestâ"is built using the same state-of-the-art IBM 130-nanometer process technology as the PowerPC G5 processor. A superefficient point-to-point architecture rovides each primary subsystem with dedicated throughput to main memory, so massive amounts of data can traverse the system without contention for bandwidth. In contrast,
subsystems that share a bus, as on other PCs, must deal with time-consuming arbitration while they negotiate for access and bandwidth across a common data path.

Yours only has 1 flat panel instead of two-- add another $2205. Also, you'll be unable to hook both DVI monitors up via the Radeon 9800-- you'll need to get a slower PCI video card to hook the other up.

Yours doesn't have a 3 year support contract, does it?

Also, the Apple you could get much more cheaply if you were to use third party RAM. Vendor RAM is always expensive.

Finally, as to "2 much faster machines"-- the dual 2GHz PPC G5 is 41% faster in SPECfp_rate_base2000 than a dual 3.06GHz Xeon, which IMO is the most important SPEC benchmark. It's faster in all the others, too, except single processor integer performance.

Let me think-- I could pay $12k and get two of the nicest LCD panels available and the fastest dual processor workstation available in the world made by a vendor with great fabrication quality and customer support. Or I could spend $9k to get two good (but not as nice as the Apple) LCD panels and machines that are only 71% of the speed from a no-name vendor. I think I'd pick Apple.

What PC and Mac users can't seem to understand is that 64-bit desktops were commonplace in the early 90s among the very large technical computing market - everything from universities to engineering firms to Hollywood studios. I am incredulous at all the hype that both Apple and Intel are spreading - for almost 10 years, it's been unusual for me to only use 32-bit processors!

I wonder how one of these Apples would stack up against an SGI Fuel with an R16K.

As a PC user, I was used to buying a machine and having a processor with double the clockspeed a year down the line... And now Apple has pulled the same trick:(

Oh well. I'm not going to complain... The specs on those machines were unbelievable - I'm just glad Apple is no longer lagging behind in the specs anymore, and the prices on those machines are reasonable to boot.

Damn you Steve Jobs. You introduce something perfect for the Music world yet again. The Emagic 1000 note demo was very cool, but thinking about all the plugins one could use in Protools or other programs.....plus Optical Inputs.....the drool factor is extreme.

So, Steve, I'm going to be saving my money again to get one of your products. The last one, a 9500 bought in 1996 has lasted very well. I wish I could say the same for the Pentium PC I bought in 1997.

I look forward to making tons of recordings and music with this new rig!

The SPEC results are really interesting. Single-processor integer performance (which matters most at least for me, although CPU performance is hardly interesting for me these times) is slightly worse than Intel's flagships, but the clock rate is also significantly lower.

However, the most interesting part is that they used GCC to compile the SPEC suite, and not some special compiler to make hardware look good in benchmarks (in contrast to some vendor compilers). Given that all the software I run has been compiled by GCC (with the exception of a few Lisp programs), the numbers are a bit more relevant than the usual SPEC results for me.

On the other hand, you could claim that Apple chose GCC on the Intel platforms to make them look bad in this comparison...

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these new systems will be seeing how AltiVec performs now that the processor has a bus with sufficient bandwidth to keep the AltiVec unit supplied with instructions and data. On the older G4s the AltiVec unit could execute instructions faster than the bus could supply it with instructions and data to process.

Aluminum cases? Yeah BABY -- no more cheesy plastic! For years now I've been impressed by Apple's being the only computer shop doing anything whatsoever with industrial design. Ever since I saw the original Mac in the mid-80s I've been impressed by the 'fit and finish', for want of a better term, of Macintoshes versus the basic generic shitbox clone PCs. However, ever since the iMac New Way I've been really, really disappointed by the cheapness of the desktop cases, especially of the high-end towers. If you want me to pay extra, give me something that looks worth the price.

From what I can tell of the WWDC pictures, things have finally changed. These things look sweet, even if they do look just like the last 5 years worth of towers. Plus it sounds like they kick ass performance-wise. All I have to do now is convince myself why I should go and drop 3 grand I can't afford for no other reason than to connect with the iPod I don't have.

First off, GCC is probably better optimized for x86 then it is for the PPC 970 by virtue of the fact that it's been running on x86 for so much longer. So, even using the same compiler, the field is still tilted in the direction of x86.

Second, the test is of the speed of the processors, not the quality of the optimizing compilers for them.

Third, the "fastest" comment was made with respect to the dual-processor configurations. The numbers you site are for the single-processor version.

Yes, in single-processor land Apple lost in intspec by about 10%, but won in floating-point land by about 30%. This is using a compiler that is better optimized for the competitor. And they still came out ahead.

In dual-processor land they came out ~10% ahead in integer land and over 40% ahead in floating-point land. A tremendous difference.

The real-world tests they performed seemed to back up these results with Photoshop, Mathematica and a few other programs running an average of 2x faster on the PPC 970.

This may sound incredible, but it is just a matter of bandwidth, and the G5 has plenty of it.

The dual-processors have completely independant busses, a 1Ghz FSB, 400Mhz 128-bit DDR memory, two independant floating-point units and two independant integer units. The PPC970 is capable handling over 120 in-flight instructions, that is, instructions which can be worked on and processed in parallel. In P4-land only a few dozen instructions are can potentially be run in parallel.

Do you really think that Apple would hire a company like VeriTest to verify their results and then lie about them? If they didn't actually have better spec scores they just wouldn't have used those tests...

I hope the uninformed writers won't discourage potential buyers. I offer the following example from a Business Week post [businessweek.com] in the last hour as an example. I'm sure/.'ers will quickly find more to offer.

For several years, Apple has lagged in the megahertz race. Motorola's G4 processors have only slowly improved in performance, while Intel and Advanced Micro Devices crank out ever-faster chips at a much swifter clip. Megahertz isn't everything when it comes to performance, but increasing the clock speed generally does boost chip and computer performance.

Yeah the writer eventually says megahertz isn't everything, but fails to grasp that megahertz isn't anything. The only scale that matters is how much work the system can do. Megahertz doesn't even have to enter into the discussion.

Btw, for the record, I'm a PC owner/user who probably won't switch, but still thinks these new Macs, along with the AMD Opteron chips, are the best news to come along in a good long while for all of us!

Am I the only one who thought, immediately after hearing about the high quality firewire based iSight (not to mention that new video codec), that there ought to be able to connect that sucker to your iPod to record on the road? So your webcam can double as a REAL cam?

Of course it would be much easier if you could display color video on your iPod... and generate it on the fly...

Apple lists some rather low scores for the intel xeon on their website as compared to the scores listed on www.spec.org (889 vs. 1164 in base-integer, 693 vs. 1213 in base-fp). The fine print on apple's web page says that the scores were generated with gcc on both platforms. Give me a break. Intel should be penalized because they have better compilers?

Also, the opteron, using intel's compiler, manages to beat the 970 in int and fp.

Actually, if you look at the benchmarks, the GCC scores are actually pretty close (for the FP benchmarks). Where the Intel side really fails is with the Fortran compiler, which is generally considered to be a pretty good Fortran compiler.

Given that if you are comparing Linux vs. OS X, the vast majority of your code will have been compiled with gcc, and the number of man years spent optimizing gcc's x86 performance, I think this is actually a pretty fair benchmark.

Here's the deal: if you want to know how one computer compares to another, you have to use the same compiler.

not true at all. See below.

I mean, you just have to. Otherwise the test is meaningless. You can only test for one variable at a time if you want to get results that mean something.

Say you have compiler A which rocks for architecture A and sucks hard for architecture B. You run SPEC with this compiler, and A wins.

The next day you have compiler B which rocks for architecture B and sucks hard for architecture A. You run SPEC, and B wins.

How are these results meaningful? They say absolutely nothing about the two architectures independent of the compiler used. If you used completely different compiler brands for each architecture, you'd end up with the same thing: Results that are dependent on the compilers used.

The fact of the matter is, cross-architecture comparisons suck no matter what you do. GCC 3.3 for IA32 and GCC 3.3 for the G5 need to be treated as completely different compilers in any valid testing methodology. It doesn't matter that they have the same name and version number -- if they're compiling for different architectures, they're doing things differently. using "the same compiler" to try to feign fairness is simply a sneaky marketing trick.

So what is one to do? Well it depends on the result you want:

-- if you always use GCC 3.3 to compile your high speed apps and want to know which CPU GCC 3.3 works best for, then apple's (Veritest's) results are perfect for you. However, those results really say more about how good GCC is at optimizing for the separate architectures, rather than anything about the merits of the architectures themselves.

-- trying to compare the merits of the architectures themselves is the tricky part. Generally, modern processors need their code to be very well optimized to fully exploit the power of the processor. Therefore, a fair comparison would be between The Best Compiler for Architecture A vs The Best Compiler for Architecture B. This is the only way to even come close to comparing "What architecture A can do" vs "What architecture B can do". And this is what most people want out of a benchmark.

(Of course one has to make sure that the compilers used aren't cheating on the spec benchmarks to give huge results. This is where the base vs peak distinction is important.)

Finally, on a somewhat related note, if the speed of specific applications is most important to you, then of course you'd be looking at application benchmarks and not SPEC.

Summary: It not only beats up the P4 and Xeon, it takes their lunch money as well.

n âoeSPEC rateâ tests, the dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 completed the set of floating-point calculations 95 percent faster than the Pentium 4 â" based system and 42 percent faster than the dual Xeon-based workstation. Integer performance was also far superior to the Pentium 4 â" based system and 3 percent faster than the dual Xeon-based system.

It did even better at DNA matching: "Testing BLAST with common searches using a word size of more than 11, the Power Mac G5 far outperformed the Pentium 4-based system and the dual Xeon-based system, and nearly five times faster at the long word length of 40."

Happy the Apple people are fairly cutting edge. Nice to see ATI and nVidia options.

Why only 8-gig of RAM? 64-bit CPUs supports terabytes. I guess it's not a server, but 8 gig isn't that much any more.

Some comparisons with the Opteron (or, to be more fair, Athalon64) would be nice. Of course, since you can (or will be able to) select from a slew of motherboards, it will be tough to get a decent comparison.

One other thought just struck me (I can feel a bruise developing) - Apple never releases their stuff to independant hardware vendors. Never seen an Apple product (other than an iPod) reviewed at Anandtech, Toms Hardware, TechExtreme, Ars Technica, etc. Would be interesting to hear what a site like that had to say.

Steve Jobs also noted in his speech that the new G5 outperforms a comparable Xeon system on the all imporant "Duke Nukem Forever" time demo. Attaining the impressive score of 233fps compared to just 147fps on the Intel system. As verified by the idependent test lab Pixar Studios.

The machine is fast and the OS is advanced. But what irks me to no end is that Apple seems hell-bent on keeping the Mac in its little niche market. It doesn't make much sense but Apple refused to capitalize on people's migration from traditional Unix to the more "user friendly" NT. As an example I'll use the situation I am most familiar with but keep in mind this sort of thing is probably similar across dozens of industries. Computer hardware and electronics design. The most popular tools today are probably those from Cadence [cadence.com] and Synopsys [synopsys.com]. Both have powerful software suits available for 32-bit and 64-bit versions Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and NT(32)/XP. For some reason people started migrating from Unix to NT. So now I'm stuck using design and verification tools on 2000. When I use Mentor Graphics ModelSim and Cadence's Layout and PSpice I have to install all this extra stuff like Cygwin, and Perl just to try to imitate the functionality avaialable in Unix. I'm sure many other people do this. Plus, these third party tools are so poorly integrated into the rest of the OS.With Mac OS X, it's all there. The complete Unix toolset and environment comes standard, the Macs are good for graphics as it is (which is what all these new design tools focus on anyway), and the UI is a dream to use. It's simply a better platform in a lot of different ways. Check out Sun and SGI's third party applications pages, then look at Apples. There are whole industries missing. Here's where Apple needs to come in and sell these people on their product. Users want better software, software companies want a larger use base and better product and Apple wants to ship more units. Why is this not being done?The funny thing is that in-house ASIC design at Apple is probably done on Solairs, HP, or NT. I'm sending e-mail Cadence and gang. Everyone who doesn't want to see this whole industry to be swallowed by NT and wants to move to OS X should do the same.

A comparable (except obvious diff of OS and processor) 1.6 Ghz Apple system comes to $2820, and that's without the raid harddrive setup. How much better is the apple system going to do at games? I realize that's not the entire (or even a big part) of the computer market, but it is MY market:), and I'd be interested to know.

Means that all three systems have the same multiplier on the chip. Which strongly implies to me that they're all the exact same chip. We'll have to wait and see how easy they are to overclock, but if you could just change the 800Mhz bus system to 1Ghz bus, you'd save yourself $1000 in the process.

No other company can pull off so many cool things so quickly like Apple, not MS, not Sun, not HP, not even IBM, and certainly not Dell the box maker.

You have to watch Steve in QuickTime to fully appreciate how many amazing things Apple has done. Panther Developer Preview has already left Longhorn (Windows 2005) firmly in the dust bin: the new user-centric Finder, search-as-you-type, Expose, fast user switch, iChat AV, FileVault, Xcode, FontBook, and so on.

In terms of SPEC2000 floating point performance, the 2 GHz G4 is 21% faster than the 3.06 GHz P4, and the dual 2 GHz G5 PowerMac is 41% faster than a dual 3 GHz Xeon Dell which cost $1000 more. In real world tests (PhotoShop, Mathematica, 3D rendering, music), the PowerMac is more than 200% faster than the Dell.

It's clear that Apple has all the vital pieces nailed - harware, OS, applications, developers, Apple Retail Stores, iTune Music Store, iPod. It's time to buy some more Apple shares.

The longer Apple waits to update the 15" PB, the more likely it will be a G5 for lots of reasons.

1. The 12" (or perhaps the 17") motherboard could fit in the 15" case, so from a tech standpoint, I can't see the motherboard design being 6+ months behind that of the 12" (or 17"), it would be nearly impossible to be that far behind.

2. Steve wants to be the first to ship a 64 bit portable. (No one is closer than Apple now).

3. Bluetooth, AirPort Extreme. Plenty of people want those in a portable, but don't want a 12" screen or a 17" screen. (me for one:-) ).

All this points to the fact that something significant is going on. It is something like the G5 or, perhaps, a higher-density screen. I doubt it would be the higher-density screen because that should NOT be that huge a tech issue, and I can't believe they'd delay the product 6+ months for that when they could've shipped it with a regular screen and then updated it now.

My scenario about the 15" delays is this:They intentionally held back on the 15" in Jan/Feb 2003 and kept it as it was so that if there were huge problems with the 12" and 17" (e.g. long(er) delays, engineering/manuf issues etc) they'd have a proven machine that was shipping. They were planning that the PB 15 was supposed to be updated in May at WWDC with a G5 (or very shortly thereafter) and so didn't waste any design and engineering resources on updating it to the specs of the current 12" and 15" because (back then it would have been May 2003 for WWDC, so only about 3 months wait for it). They intended to make it the 1st 15" G5 and have it ready with the PM G5s.

However, they are a little behind for some reason, just like they were with the PM G5s - that's why they pushed back WWDC a month.

Until they know when they can ship them in volume they're not announcing it for at least two reasons: avoid killing 12", 15" and 17" sales; and so they'll get even more bang for the buck when the announce "the world's first 64-bit portable," just like they got with the "world's 1st 17 inch portable". It will be on its own and won't get overshadowed by the PM G5s.

Face it, Apple loses sales because of some of the factors above and they don't want to lose sales. Therefore there is some BIG reason for the delay. The only logical one is a 15" PB G5, followed as quickly thereafter as possible with a 17" ("The world's 1st 64-bit 17 inch portable) and a 12" ("The world's smallest 64-bit portable). Followed thereafter by G4 iBooks.

I can see a 15" PB G5 announcement within 1-3 months (e.g. by the end of the summer). Apple *has* to do something to update the 15" PB to current specs (speed, AEX, Bluetooth) and if they've invested engineering in the PB G5 they don't have time to go back and do the engineering to make it a G4 - which is why I think it will be soon. If it was going to be > 3 months then they'd have time to do a 15" G4 to match the 17", BUT then they would've done it well before now.

I don't think it is wishful thinking because Apple is not dumb. They wouldn't hold up 15" PB sales for more than 6 months without a great reason. (Plus I read somewhere that 15" PB supplies were low.)

This is the machine that I have been waiting for (and have been putting off upgrading my G4/450).

Still, there are a few things I would like to have seen different, that I think are a step back from my Sawtooth:

1) Only one outward-facing drive. My Sawtooth can only have one optical and one 3.5" (A now-nearly-useless Zip drive for me), but the last generation of G4s had those dual optical drive bays. Given how cheap standard IDE CR burners etc are, it would be great to have that upgradeability option. In my quest to convert my friends, this has been a sticking point for many of them (most have at least two optical drives). Externals work, yes, but are much more expensive, and take up much more space.

2) Two hard drive bays. Even my Sawtooth has room for four internal hard drives. Again, IDE hard drives are cheap (Serial ATA not as much, but still....) and not everyone wants to pay a $100 premium for an external firewire box, just to do a drive upgrade. In many cases, that doubles the price of the bare drive. There are PC cases out there (ugly ones, natch) which give six front-facing bays and as many hard-drive bays.

3) The G4s were notoriously easy to access. The one side just flipped down and BAM! there was your whole motherboard. While the side of the G5 may be easy to remove, you still have to cram your hands into that tiny space to reach anything. Having everything fold out was a great innovation that I'm sad to see go.

4) The handles look OK in my opinion but are fairly thin metal. I can't imagine these things not hurting your hands if you're carrying a G5 around. I know you don't move a tower case that much, but if you're going to bother putting on handles, at least put on comfy ones.

5) As others have said, it would be nice to see a 128MB graphics card in the high end. But that's a minor quibble, really.

6) No reset button on the front. I know OS X crashes quite rarely, but sometimes this thing comes in handy. And it's a lot easier and more intuitive than holding the power button.

That said, I think these are fabulous machines, and will do Apple proud. Aside from the obvious blazing speed, a few other touches I liked:1) front-mounted USB & firewire. Finally!

3) I think the cooling system is a stroke of genius. Nine fans sounds like a lot, but it gives much more custom air circulation patterns.

4) Eight RAM slots! I will likely never need 8 gigs of RAM (at least not before the Power Mac G7 in 2008:), but having that many slots allows you to upgrade at your desired rate. ie: you are less likely to have to pull out chips to make room for new ones. My G4's slots are all full right now, so if I wanted to add RAM, I'd have to ditch one chip.

All my whining aside, this is a great machine! Now if only I had some money...

I am quite sure there are some people out there who used Alpha-based workstations back when Digital made them.

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The Single 900MHz is 7,595The Single 1.2GHz is 9,995The DUAL 1.2GHZ is 13,995 (whoops off by 7.5%)

What about Dual 2.0GHz don't you understand? They may not have been in the same market before now. However, that will soon change (there is your clue). As far as the 106 CPU Version Cluster the XServes the same way Sun does it. I said Sun should be scared. They no longer have a lock on the 64bit market.

I guess things never change in your world. Look out someone may be moving your cheese.

Out of interest, how much is it for the 106-CPU version of the Mac, again?

For the workstation market, it doesn't matter very much.

I have been a Sun fan for some time, now, but I see the dual PowerPC 970 Mac and dual Opteron workstations coming down the line and wonder. These, feature-for-feature, make Sun Blade, IBM RS-6000, SGI Fuel, etc., much harder sells.

The G5 is gorgeous and powerful (like a Bond girl). The Opteron will be white-box and powerful (like the neighborhood geek-girl:). There's probably something for everyone, here. For completeness, I suppose Windows on Itanium would be like some sort of beast woman who still gets guys, because she is easy (blecch).

Sun and Apple are targeting completely different markets.

This was very true three years ago. However, what would happen if PTC released Pro/E for OS X? It's really a matter of the applications. Not only that, but I would bet getting Motif on OS X isn't too hard (suddenly lots of UNIX applications on OS X becomes plausible).

The workstation is going through serious evolution, right now. 64-bits is no longer the domain of the "big guys." The next two years will be very interesting.

There is a big difference between Sun $14K offerings and Apply $2K offerings. The difference isn't predicated on speed, but on sustainability. Sun's expensive enterprise level machines have all sorts of hardware and software support to make sure they never EVER go down, at least not without warning.

You cannot just take an enterprise machine and replace it with a desktop, because eventually the desktop will fail, usually unexpectedly and usually at the worst possible time.

Desktop PC's are meant to go on DESKTOPS, where if they fail, the most you've lost is a few man-hours of work. Enterprise machines go in server rooms where if they fail you might have just lost a few million in sales, and pissed off your customer base.

Oh yeah, and they can also run Mac OSX, OS9, and 64-bit UNIX scientific, math, and engineering applications at blazing speed and with unprecedented ease of use. So what's a Sun box good for again?

I'm no Sun evangelist (as a matter of fact, I hate their products lately), but let's at least stop displaying our abject ignorance. What's a Sun box good for? How about naming me a high-end manufacturing/engineering design package that runs on OS X first, then we can talk about what a Sun box is good for.

I sat next to three guys from Dassault at the keynote, and about two rows back from a whole busload of guys from PTC. CATIA and the Pro-E products are going to be out on OS X by the time the G5's ship, or shortly thereafter.

I'd like to see some independently-verified benchmarks before I believe that it's the "Fastest desktop in the world". I seriously doubt ol' bullshitter Stevo would tell the full truth.

Well, the problem is... Steve is telling the truth.Go to www.spec.org and look at the SpecINT and SpecFP ratings for the Power4 (single core benchmark).Okay, the PPC970 is based on this core and yes, at 1,6 Ghz it runs around an 3 Ghz P4.Okay, now take a look at the SpecINT and SpecFP ratings for the alpha 21264 and 21364.Those processors are a real match for the P4.With a 1.5 times slower clock they are as fast as most 1.5 higher clocked P4's.The thing is, that intel doesn't have a decent 64 bits processor.Their itanium II is a joke with a performance which is equal to most 64 bits processors 2 or 3 years ago.Contrary to intel ibm knows how to build fast 64 bits processors without all the tradeoff's intel had to make with the P4.Second, if you look at the price of the PPC970 and compare it with the P4 you will see that the P4 is almost 2 times as expensive as the PPC970.Let's face it, at the moment there is no 64 bits or 32 bits processor available which is faster than the PPC970 (i mean for desktop systems).It will take intel at least more than a year to get the itanium near the PPC970 2 Ghz..But then they are no match to the PPC970 3 Ghz. which will be available then.

The Power4+ uses 128MB of L3 cache so it is not a fair or direct comparison, the G5 needs about 33% faster clockrate to equal the performance of the Power4+. Currently the highest Specfp_base2000 other than the Power4+ 1.5Ghz is the 1Ghz Itanium 2, amazing that Intel's workstation/big server processor manages to perform about as well as Power4+ with a 50% higher clockrate, guess they can design a decent core when they aren't going after the consumer crowd with the Ghz matters.

I hate to bust your bubble, but there is no such thing as SMP P4. Intel designed the P4 to be only single processor. Xeon is for SMP applications.

Also, with SMP you can't just double the speed of one chip to come up with a benchmark. You double it, and take 10-15% off the top. You see, there is overhead in SMP because the two processors need to communicate to make sure they are on the same page, so to speak.

Such a file can easily get into hundreds of megabytes in size, and Photoshop generally needs 2x to 3x as much RAM as the actual file size to efficiently work; even then it starts to bog down at those file sizes.

My dual G4/450 with 1.5 GB RAM and Radeon 9000 already gags on that enough so that it's a hassle when I have to design and edit that kind of stuff. Believe me, I'm going to be first in line as soon as I scrape together the $2500 or so for a new G5 system with added RAM (the more RAM, the merrier -- Photoshop is VERY hungry for RAM).

Not to mention video editing and 3D, both of which are markets that the Mac has generally been strong (if not dominant) in for some time.

I might add that you could ask the same question about P4-based PCs. Who needs that kind of firepower? Not many (mainstream) people, really -- aside from perhaps gamers. The vast majority of users just do e-mail, web surfing and word processing, maybe a little photo editing. A P2 or P3 running Linux or an older version of Windows would be more than enough in those cases. Hell, even an old Pentium with a smallish Linux installation would be enough in many cases.

OTOH if you give users and developers the added power of new processors and mainboards (strange that HyperTransport hasn't gotten much mention here), people will find a way of using it. One example: Apple's predicted that video editing will be the next mainstream computing revolution, like desktop publishing was twenty years ago. If you think about it, they're probably right.

Most newer computers can easily handle basic video editing now; the question is just how to make it easier for Joe Sixpack to edit his family videos (and maybe make Junior a budding David Lynch).

First off, your English unfortunately is working against your making a point. I think you meant to say that Macs cost 30% more than PCs, which is simply ignorant to state.
Second, you are dead wrong on price/performace. I work in a lab doing bioinformatic analysis of the bovine genome. The OLD G4 Xserves gets twice the performance per dollar as any linux-based workstations, built in-house or otherwise. In many ways they are faster to use for our jobs than shared-memory supercomputers to which we have access.
Third, I also compose music, do some game development (including some 3D graphics work), and have done so on Macs and PCs. Even on an older Mac, I am far more productive, but back to the point: Configure a somewhat equivalent Dell and compare the price to a G5. Not only is the price competitive, the performance is superior with the Mac. Your attempted point on bang-for-buck is outright false.
In any case, no one has suggested you buy a Mac in the first place, so why are you so defensive?

I don't care about the Mac's legendary ease of use, I'm not braindead.

You know, I think that's one of the most ignorant comments I've heard on Slashdot-- and that's saying something!

I certainly don't consider myself braindead and I love using my Mac. I think the user interface of OS X is leaps and bounds beyond that of Windows or any of the latest Linux desktops.

I also know of plenty of very intelligent people who use Macs simply because they are easier to use and it allows them to focus on the task at hand. Not everyone takes the slop they're fed and feels that it's "good enough" (which is basically what you are saying). Some of us actually don't mind paying a little bit extra-- if even there is any extra to be paid. $3,000 for a dual 2GHz 64-bit machine is pretty damn low IMHO.

Of course, my guess is your needs are different than mine. My needs dictate that I have a fast and easy to use UNIX system. The cheapest computer meeting those needs is a PowerMac.

Perhaps instead you are interested in playing the latest whiz-bang gaming title-- in that case you want a Pee Cee.

But can you get a dual processor Pentium? Of course the answer is "yes". Not only that, you can get 4x and 8x (and possibly more) Pentium and Xeon systems. You can also get 1x, 2x, and 4x, etc Opteron systems with a Hypertransport bus